* MagniFire secures Web apps at the application level
If you are running any kind of online commercial operation then the liabilities associated with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and California’s law requiring disclosure of network intrusions that reveal personal data (SB 1386) must be a significant concern to you.
The thing you really want to do is head off problems that could get you mired in legal hot water. When it comes to building and maintaining secured Web applications, this is no mean feat.
Start-up MagniFire Websystems has just launched TrafficShield, an “appliance” designed to secure Web applications at the application level. The goal is to secure Web sites, applications and services against malicious activity including hacking attempts and various flooding attacks. TrafficShield is claimed to operate “near wire speed” thereby adding minimally to latency.
TrafficShield can work with existing security systems such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems but unlike those measures MagniFire claims that the product “protects against entire classes of HTTP and HTTPS based threats (known AND unknown), rather than protecting against a limited list of known attacks.” It also requires no modifications to existing Web servers or Web applications.
At the heart of the system is MagniFire’s Application Flow Model algorithm that “maps” each application, learns the allowable user interactions and generates “recommended granular security protocols to proactively prevent attacks before they’ve even been identified or become ‘known attacks.'”
TrafficShield protects against cookie or hidden field manipulation, worm insertion, injection of malicious SQL, HTML or JavaScript, buffer overflows and privilege elevation, Web site defacement or content alteration, and application floods or back-end resource consumption. Even more profoundly, the company claims that the system guarantees “no false positives and no false negatives.”
TrafficShield units can be used singularly or, to ensure resilience and scalability, in clusters front-ending multiple Web servers and load balancers. The cost per unit is $25,000.
